Web Project: The Events of 1989 in Czechoslovakia

The year 1989 is one of the key moments in modern Czech history. Particularly over the course of the latter half of that year, the communist totalitarian regimes in Central and Eastern Europe successively collapsed. Czechoslovakia’s turn came in November 1989, when its so-called normalization regime – or the period of hard-line socialist re-entrenchment lasting roughly from the August 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion through 1989 – relinquished power over the course of several weeks, under the strong pressure of the opposition and the public. This dismantling of the zone of satellite states ultimately led two years later to the fall of Communist power in the Soviet Union itself. Nonetheless, in spite of the amount of time that has passed since then, all of the facts at our disposal related to this period have yet to be presented and interpreted. The goal of this Web project is thus to make select relevant documents – especially those deriving from the Communist security services, and today deposited in the Security Services Archive – available to the public.